7 Days to Die – Electricity for Dummies

Electricity, Wiring, Generators and Traps, I’ll make sure that all of this is covered.

Other 7DTD Guides:

Basic Stuff

Please note: all credit goes to Owlie!

What you need to start using Electricity.

  • Wire Tool (either find them scavenging or craft the yourself using steel)
  • A functional Workbench
  • Stable supplies of forged Iron
  • Crafting Components
  • Generator Bank

Frequently Ignored Questions

Q: Waaah!! Why can’t I connect this wires waaaah!!!

Well you knobhead, there wire connection has 2 different type of connections, to simplify there are IN and OUT connection. When you pull out a wire from right clicking the object, the object you first click becomes the OUT connection and the object you connect it to (as in right clicked second) becomes the IN connection.

All object are only allowed to recieve one IN connection, while some are allowed to give as many OUT connenction as they want to such as relays, this pic will explain it.

7 Days to Die - Electricity for Dummies
7 Days to Die - Electricity for Dummies

Q: Battery Bank pls?

Incase you got confused from previous question and haven’t read this guide, well don’t bother looking, the Generator is all that you need, batteries are optional!

Battery Bank’s recipe can only be brought from traders, and it’s not scavengeable at all, and it’s chance of even appearing in the trader’s inventory is really really frickin low. so If you really want that schematic, then you better start visiting them every week until one of them start selling the schematics.

Battery Banks are used to store energies generated by the solar bank to be used during the night, in which the solar bank is un-craftable and require you to buy it from traders at a very expensive cost.

Q: Component WHERE???

Now if you’re to stingy to buy the electrical objects from the trader (which they sell plenty of), you might want to craft them yourself (which require you to invest lot of skill point). The only skill worth investing in is ranged traps and melee traps (other stuff unlocked by those are buyable at a rather fair price).

Now to the easy part, if you did not brought the DIY perk, you now feel confused and thinking of how to get the components required, well don’t worry, I’ll list all of them and where to get them.

Note that you’ll have to use wrench, otherwise you’ll get only scrap iron.

  • Mechanical Parts – Cars, Gas Pumps (naah, the provide free gas when loot resetted so ignore this one), Fridges, Lockpicked Safes, Shopping Carts. 
  • Electrical Parts – Cars, Oven, Fridges, Air Conditioner, Television, Fusebox, Cash Register and any Light Sources.
  • Electronic Components – Television (that’s all, some item that give electrical parts also give electronic components but rare).
  • Scrap Plastic – TV, Plastic Cooler, Plastic Plate (some metal plates have rare chance to spawn as plastic plate instead).

Q: Is using electricity worth it?

Hell yeah it is, no risk, no effects on heatmap, and makes your defenses better in many ways.

Advanced Bullstuff

Relays

Now the thing about relays is that they only take one IN, but give as many OUT as they wishes to (jk they do have limit, but you’re not likely to reach those less you done it purposefully), It’s main uses are just to simply exend the reach of your cables.

Wire Management

When you begin starting to have tons of wire hanging around and that it looks annoying, you better start exending them in several different way like, to build pylons and pretend that it’s a power line, or sort the ceiling lamps by placing the extra relays on your roof. There are many ways to hide your cable, but it’s purely aesthetic and would actually burden you with more power consumption from additional relays.

Speaker

Here’s something you want to know about Speaker.
Does it attract zombies?
Nah.

Camera Control

Camera controls can only be done by spotlight and turrets, they can only be aimed when powered, and the secret thing about the cam control is that it doesnt really affect your turret’s aiming degree, but it will allow you to use your turrets manually like some kind of machine gun on a tripod.

Power Generation

Generator Bank

How? Learn it’s perk from sceience skill.
Where? Get it’s engines from disassembling cars that lays around the road.
Why? It uses gas that regenerates from gas station’s pum, and work 24/7 which is good for starter bases.

Battery Bank

How? Learn it’s perk from book brought at traders.
Where? Same with Gen-bank, you can get car batteries from disassembling cars.
Why? Bat-bank let’s you connect multiple generators as a mediator to increase the alloted power output of a wire network, also works well with sol-bank.

Solar Bank

How? Buy em from traders.
Where? Solar Cells are also brought from traders.
Why? It works daily, as long as it’s not roofed, doesn’t consume gas, and less requirement to maintain it.

Switches and Triggers

Switch

Well, it’s a switch, kinda like work relays, let’s you manage whether you want let power to flow to a network manually, such is deactivating traps when you’re repairing you base.

Timed Relays

This special relay allow you to manually set time on when power will flow to a network, thus activating it. Best be used to save power on light if your base has windows.

Time Efficiencies

  • Outdoor Lamps = 20:00 – 05:30
  • Spotlight = Depend on when zombies will go feral (default is 22:00 – 04:00
  • Indoor Lamp of a windowed House = 19:30 – 6:00

Pressure Plates & Tripwire

Mostly used to activate dart traps and alarm, difference is how you want to camoflage them, tripwire are invisible and can be hidden behind a door.

Those two are a bad pair with any traps other than dart trap, trust me.

Motion Sensors

Basically and advanced trigger that look for selected targer (which happen to be chosable) between you, friends, stranger, and Zombies, and you can pick more than one.

Traps

Electric Fence Post

Take and Gives only one IN and OUT, you can link in as many fence post as you want and complete a circle by forming the last post adjacent but opposide to each other.

It is much more preferable to separate the electiric lines if possible due to them breaking easily by police zombies, or any other disgruntled zombies.

Dig their base one block lower, and you’ll have it hit even crawlers too, but leave thems standing flat and you can crouch below them to navigate around.

Blade Trap

Doesn’t discriminate, better than any combined, expenisve to maintain, but kill virtually almost any zombies, oh did I say that it doesn’t discriminate, because this thing kill you as fast as it kills zombies, so be careful.

Dart Trap

More DPS than turrets, ammos are cheap, but it can aim for♥♥♥♥♥♥ so you’ll have to position it to where it’ll score a headshot, wich instant kill common zombies, or two hit the toughther one.

Turrets

Same abilites as motion sensor, your camera direction given to it won’t have any effect, and it’ll have it’s maximum shooting radials, it also somehow stealthy, and will never raise your heatmap.

Smg turret will attemp to shoot at a small accurate burst and will always go for headshot, while Shotgun turret will drain off it’s buckshot to deal maximum damage to nearest zombie.

Leave some of them inside your house on stranger targeting during pvp, since it’s the second best anti player weaponry, only to be beated by candy tin lanmines hidden in grasses.

Good Pairings

  • MS + Blade Trap – Place blade trap in front of door, then place Motion Sensors a bit higher from blade trap, point it down so it faces the dart trap, set to zombies and bam, you’ll have a very effective defense from zombies that manages to survive your wall of spikes and electric posts 
  • MS + Light – Truly, only youtuber think that this is an effective mix, most of the time you won’t even bother wasting power for it when nobody want to waste their time looking and waiting for a bunch of light bulb turn on. 
  • MS/Tripwire + Speaker – Best to use this kind of alert system when you live undeground, or that your base doen’t have any window (just use bulletproof glass fam, it’s really gud). 
  • PP + Dart Trap – Literally what they were meant to do, either place the dart right above the plate (pointing down) for instant headshot, or place em’ as corridor trap and hope that the zombie that passes trought are short enough to recieve a heatshot 
  • PP + Dart Trap + Electric Fence – Same combination as above, but the fence will immobilize running zombie, maximizing the accuracy of the dart trap 
  • Tripwire + Turret – This are just to allow you to limit the trigger range of the turret, so it will have maximum accuracy, close range works best with shotgun turret.
Volodymyr Azimoff
About Volodymyr Azimoff 15057 Articles
I love games and I live games. Video games are my passion, my hobby and my job. My experience with games started back in 1994 with the Metal Mutant game on ZX Spectrum computer. And since then, I’ve been playing on anything from consoles, to mobile devices.

1 Comment

  1. Blade traps aren’t expensive to maintain. If you’re talking about forged steel, steel picks can smash boulders in as low as 3 hit giving you 50-100 raw iron which is 250-500 scrap iron. I spent half a day in-game mining boulders and got 7500 raw iron with a steel pick. Gas is extremely easy to get aswell since burnt forests now have shale deposits everywhere above ground and with only miner 69er 4 you can get as much as 500-600 per deposit. Considering 12 shale is equivalent to 100 gas… that’s a heck of a lot. I only mined a couple and got about 34k gas in return.

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